Severed
by lionesseyes13
Summary: Seaver comes face to face with the worst monster of all.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: This is set the night after the final battle against the spidrens at the end of _First Test_.

Disclaimer: If I were Tamora Pierce, the size of my bank account would be very different than it is now. That is all I have to say on the subject of my identity.

Severed

Seaver of Tasride woke up screaming. As usual, he wasn't screaming out loud, but rather shrilly and silently inside his own skull. For what must have been the hundredth time in his life, he wished that he had a tendency to scream aloud like everyone else did. He wished that his mouth didn't go as dry as parchment and his lips as immobile as a boulder every time he was terrified. He knew that many people—those who regarded screaming as a sign of weakness almost as humiliating as wetting your breeches—would have killed for the gift of naturally screaming silently.

Such beings didn't understand how awful it was to realize that your screams could last forever if you screamed inside your head because you could never run out of breath. They didn't recognize how the screams ringing in the empty cavern of your ears and clashing with the quiet of the outside world could make you insane if you weren't already. They didn't comprehend how nauseating it was to know that you could scream forever and nobody would ever be able to hear you.

What had awoken him wasn't a nightmare. Nightmares never plagued him, since in his dreams he always did everything right. In his dreams, he obeyed his father and never strayed into the dark forest. In his dreams, he was never clumsy enough to become ensnared in a spidren's web. In his dreams, his father never had to ride in and rescue him. In his dreams, he never had to scream silently as the men-at-arms dragged him away from his father's half-eaten corpse. In his dreams, his hands were never stained crimson with his father's blood. In his dreams, he had never been guilty of patricide.

In his dreams, everything was different, and, after this recent battle with the spidrens, Seaver had another dream to torment him. In this dream, he didn't lose his wits during the fight and need Kel to rescue him. In this dream, he didn't blame the spidrens for a crime he had committed.

Every single one of his most haunting dreams involved him doing everything right, which meant that his real nightmares entailed what he saw and what he remembered when he awakened. His nightmares weren't lies; they were truths he couldn't bear to face.

Looking around the dark cabin where all the pages who hadn't chosen to sleep outside were staying, Seaver's gaze fell on a spider web gleaming in the moonlight. When the pages had first arrived here, Lord Wyldon had made them clean the cabin out, and the only bugs that had survived the purge were the spiders, because spiders were known to eat mosquitoes and other banes of summer camps.

Of course, if it had been up to Seaver, every spider in the cabin would be dead. Spiders were monsters. Their whole lives were devoted to making beautiful, deceptive snares for the naïve and the unwary to become entrapped in, and their only sustenance was helpless insects. Besides, spidrens—the worst monsters of all—were horrid mutations of spiders.

No, the truth was that spidrens weren't the worst monsters. Seaver only told himself they were because he couldn't bear to acknowledge the fact that he was the worst monster. After all, what made spidrens so horrifying was the fact that they were part human. Spiders could be forgiven for being monsters since they never pretended to be otherwise, but, by being part human, the spidrens feigned some semblance of normalcy, and for that, they couldn't be forgiven.

That meant that Seaver was even worse than spidrens because he pretended to be a normal human. Every time he studied with his friends he acted as though he were a typical page boy. Every moment he lived a lie. Every breath he took he behaved as though he wasn't guilty of murder.

Oh, he had tried to atone for killing his father. He had made offerings to Mithros, begging the warrior god to speak in his father's favor at the Black God's court. He had spent hours on the frigid flagstones of his family's chapel until his knees were as cold and as hard as the floor, imploring the Black God to show mercy on his father's soul.

He had confessed his crime to Mithran priests, who were supposed to be concerned with justice, but they had never assigned him a penance harsh enough to wash away his guilt. They had just assigned him prayers to absolve him of filial disobedience rather than patricide. Then, they had always assured him that the gods had forgiven him, the priests and priestesses had forgiven him, and now the only obstacle on the road to his redemption was whether he could forgive himself.

Whenever a priest told him this, Seaver could feel himself drowning in frustration and remorse, as he alone seemed to understand the truth. That meant it was his obligation to explain it to everyone else, but he could never do it properly, and he knew he couldn't do it effectively because the priests had never cringed from him in revulsion. They had never eyed him with fear as though he were the monster he knew himself to be. Instead, they rested palms on his shoulder, adopted sympathetic expressions, and addressed him with more compassion than they ever displayed when he confessed to lying or cursing or some other frequent failing of his. All that meant Seaver hadn't described clearly how he had murdered his own father. After all, he was well aware that, if he had explained himself properly, the priests would never be able to forgive him, and that was why he could never forgive himself.

Maybe it would have been better if Kel and the others hadn't managed to save him. Perhaps if he had died in the same brutal manner in which he had killed his father some cosmic equation would balance out at last. Maybe death was his only true shot at redemption.

Even with those morbid ideas spiraling around inside his brain, though, he could not bring himself to wish that Kel and the others had failed to rescue him. After all, he was a loathsome coward who loved life too much to allow himself to die in the name of absolution.

Suddenly, he found himself musing upon his own name. It was such an odd one, and he had always hated its similarity to the verb "sever." However, the name Seaver with its resemblance to "sever" was the right name for him. He was severed from mercy, from grace, and from redemption. Seaver—there was a perfectly cutting name for a monster.


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note: Originally, I had only intended this story to be one chapter long, serving as a brief insight into what Seaver might have been thinking at the end of _First Test_. However, several reviewers asked that, after describing Seaver's dilemma, I provide some resolution or attainment of inner peace on his part. Since I have always been a fan of character development, and because redemption is a theme I never tire of exploring in my work, I figured that I would write a second, concluding, chapter where Seaver is able to make some peace with himself…

Redeemed

Spread out on his sleeping mat, listening to the slow breathing of his fellow pages in the cabin, Seaver felt like screaming. It tore at his heart and his mind that they could all rest serenely, even after a brutal and bloody battle, when he never wanted to close his eyes again.

Needing to escape their innocence before it choked his guilty self, he carefully pushed off the blankets that were stifling him. Then, he rose as silently as a shadow from his mat and crept toward the door. As he crossed the cabin, he had to step over the curled frames of at least five pages, and he thanked Mithros that his greatest yard skill was stealth.

Well, of course he would be talented at sneaking around. Monsters were always good at hiding their movements, so they could ambush their victims. Perhaps he shouldn't have even thanked Mithros for his gift of stealth. Maybe such a prayer would have been better addressed to the Black God. After all, stealth made him a monster, not a warrior.

Finally, he stepped over the last page into the night. Although the crickets calling to one another in the balmy air and the wind whistling through the trees drowned out the voices in his head that shouted that he was a monster, just being outside the cabin wasn't enough to restore his breath. After all, there were still too many snoring pages sleeping outside to remind him of how much darker his soul was than his peers'.

Not knowing or caring where he was going, Seaver walked, as quietly as a panther, though the clearing toward the tree line where the forest resumed. Lifting his feet softly over page after page, he noted inwardly that he couldn't stand being among people any more. He was a wild beast, and he belonged in the savage woods at least until dawn, when he would have to start pretending to be a typical boy with nothing more than unfinished classroom assignments and petty fistfights to weigh on his conscience.

He was halfway through the clearing when something snaked around his leg. Remembering just in time not to curse since that would awaken the neighboring boys, Seaver struggled to free his leg from whatever had wrapped around it. Before he could do so, the thing that had clutched his leg yanked forward. A second later, he was sprawled on the ground, twigs and pebbles digging into his palms and his bottom throbbing.

"What are you doing roaming around the camp?" demanded a frigid tone that could only belong to Lord Wyldon. With a sinking sensation, Seaver concluded that his stealth skills had not been good enough to sneak past the training master, who must have grabbed him and tugged him to the ground.

Hoping vaguely that Lord Wyldon wouldn't recognize him in the dark and might release him without uncovering his identity, Seaver didn't respond. His heart pounded in his chest and his mind raced, but his mouth didn't budge.

"Answer me, Tasride," Lord Wyldon hissed.

Flinching, Seaver realized that the man didn't need to hear his voice to figure out who he was.

"Sleepwalking, my lord," he mumbled, his innards coiling in on themselves. It was the perfect excuse. All the most notorious murderers were somnambulists, after all.

"You're remarkably coordinated for a sleepwalker," snorted Lord Wyldon. As Seaver observed gloomily that he hadn't been coordinated enough, although he supposed that it would be a sad day indeed for the realm the day a first year page was successfully able to creep past a sleeping Lord Wyldon, the training master continued, "For sneaking around the camp in the middle of the night like a thief, you can spend a bell of time in the armory polishing swords upon our return. Go back to bed now, and don't let me catch you up again until dawn."

"I don't want to go back to bed, sir." Seaver had planned for the words to remain inside his head as a silent, futile protest as he retreated miserably to his sleeping mat. Instead, they came out of his mouth defiantly, and his muscles obstinately refused to stand up and return to the cabin.

For a few seconds, all Seaver could here were serenading crickets and snoring pages, and he thought that Lord Wyldon might have been taken aback by his sudden rebelliousness. It probably had never entered the training master's mind that the shyest first year—the one who wasn't assertive like Kel, sarcastic like Neal, hotheaded like Merric, funny like Esmond, or pugnacious like Quinden—would ever contradict him like that.

Truth be told, Seaver was rather astonished with himself. He had believed that he had learned from his sponsor, Prince Roald, just how important the art of keeping quiet was to a page, but apparently, he hadn't. At least, his tongue hadn't, at any rate.

"Tasride, I didn't ask what you wanted," Lord Wyldon informed him tersely. "I ordered you to get back to bed. You should do that immediately before I assign you more punishment work for your disobedience."

Disobedience. The word raised a tempest inside Seaver. Filial disobedience, that's what the priests always punished him for, even though that wasn't what he needed to be absolved of.

"Punish me for disobedience." Seaver discovered that bitterness made him vehement. "I don't care. I'm always getting in trouble for stupid little things—tardiness or having a candle lit after curfew. I never get punished for something major like murder. When I do something small that I don't feel guilty about at all, I get in trouble, but when I actually want to atone for something I did wrong, nobody will assign me a punishment. Even the priests aren't willing to, and that's their job."

"What in the name of Mithros do you mean?" Lord Wyldon's hands clenched around his shoulders.

"Nothing, sir." Already regretting revealing even a fraction of the monster that lurked behind the mask of the normal boy that he presented to the world, Seaver shook his head. "It doesn't matter."

"Murder isn't 'nothing'," snapped Lord Wyldon. "A reference to committing murder from one of my students matters. Now tell me what you meant, Tasride."

"I killed my own father, didn't I?" Willing himself not to cry, Seaver stared up at the pitiless moon. Even in the dark, he wasn't going to shed a tear in front of Lord Wyldon. "He told me not to go into the forest, didn't he? I couldn't just obey him, though, could I? No, I had to enter the woods, and, of course, I had to stumble across the spidrens. That had to be one of the only times in my life I remembered to scream aloud, too, so my father had to come riding to the rescue. Then, he had to die to save dumb little me because I wouldn't listen to him. He told me that there were monsters in the woods, but I didn't believe him until I met the spidrens and realized that the worst monster in the forest was me."

"Don't be melodramatic." The words should have sounded brusque, but, somehow, Lord Wyldon's tone had never been milder when he addressed Seaver. "You didn't commit murder."

"That's what the priests say, my lord," muttered Seaver dully. He felt like howling in frustration. He had hoped that his harsh training master would be the one who finally assigned him a penance severe enough to compensate for the crime he had committed. Instead, Lord Wyldon was turning all sympathetic on him just as the priests had. Why couldn't anybody comprehend that he needed a punishment and not mercy? Why couldn't anyone see that he didn't deserve mercy? "I've gone to them to confess what I did, to do penance, and to be absolved more times than I can count. All they ever do is command me to say a few quick prayers and assure me that I've been forgiven for my filial disobedience as if that's what I want redemption for. They never assign me a penance for murder."

"They can't offer you a penance for a crime you didn't commit." Somehow, Lord Wyldon's eyes managed to lance through the night into Seaver. "They can't absolve you of it, either—only you can do that, Seaver."

"You don't understand." Although he doubted Lord Wyldon could see him in the darkness, Seaver shook his head fervidly. For what must have been the millionth time, he wished that he could more accurately explain what had transpired the day his father died. Yet, even with the wisdom hindsight was supposed to afford, all he remembered about the spidrens killing his father was chaos and bloodshed. How could he possibly make sense of the carnage and mayhem for others when he himself didn't fully comprehend it?

"No, boy, it's you who doesn't understand," countered Lord Wyldon sharply. "I have killed enough people to know that what you did wasn't murder. Murder is deliberate, and you didn't intend for your father to die. As for the priests, after all the time they spend praying and studying religious texts, I'm quite sure that they know far more about what requires repentance in the eyes of the gods than you do."

"You and the priests weren't there, sir," Seaver protested softly. "Only the gods and I know the truth. I'll never be able to forgive myself for what I did, so why should the gods?"

"The truth?" repeated Lord Wyldon irritably. "The truth, Tasride, is that any father would die to save his son from spidrens, because that's what parents do: they protect their children."

"He shouldn't have been forced to die for me," Seaver argued, biting his lower lip. "I shouldn't have put him in a position where he had to die for me."

"He didn't have to die for you," snapped Lord Wyldon, and, reflexively, Seaver cringed at the tone. "He chose to die for you."

Unconvinced, Seaver remained silent, and, for a moment, a quiet as uncomfortable as a scratchy wool blanket settled over them. Then, Lord Wyldon asked, "Seaver, would you die to save your friends?"

"Yes," Seaver answered simply. It sounded silly, but after months of eating, studying, training, talking, complaining, and laughing with his friends, he was prepared to die to save any one of them. Although he hadn't realized this until after Kel and the others had rescued him in the battle against the spidrens, that didn't make the fact any less true.

"If you died rescuing one of them, would you claim that they had murdered you?" pressed Lord Wyldon.

"Of course not, sir." At first, a nonplussed Seaver didn't understand how this related to anything. Then, when he comprehended what the man was saying he gasped, "Oh."

Oh. That summed up his epiphany that his father hadn't been forced to die for him, after all. That perfectly described the revelation that his father had given his life as a gift to Seaver—he had sacrificed his life out of love for his son's. With a jolt, Seaver recognized that by wallowing in remorse he was dishonoring his father. After all, the appropriate response to a present was gratitude. He owed it to his father to make his life as full as he could, so it could be a proper tribute to the man who had loved him enough to die for his sake. He couldn't let grief cripple him.

"'Oh,' indeed," Lord Wyldon remarked dryly. "You finally understand that your situation is not nearly as unique as you think, and that the belief that you could commit a truly unpardonable offense is nothing more than a form of hubris."

Seaver didn't know how to respond to that, but he found himself saying before he was even aware of what was emerging from his lips, "I would have died today if it wasn't for Kel, my lord. She can keep a cool head when the rest of us can't. Really, she's far more likely to die for me than I am to die for her."

"Go to bed, Tasride," commanded Lord Wyldon, his manner clipped. "I can only tolerate so much nonsense from you in one night."

As he obediently crept through the clearing back to the cabin, Seaver thought that his last statement hadn't been nonsense at all, and the training master just didn't want to admit that he was right. Doubtlessly, Lord Wyldon didn't wish to acknowledge that the girl he was going to kick out of knight training was the best warrior of her year.

Still, as he crawled back onto his sleep mat, Seaver discovered that he was feeling oddly tolerant of the training master. For the first time since his father's death, he was at peace with himself, and that core of acceptance for himself allowed him to be disposed more mercifully toward others. This, in turn, meant that he was capable of appreciating the fact that the man who had heaped punishment work on him for the past year would be the one who would free him of his guilt. Well, he had always been told that the gods spoke through the most unexpected agents, so anyone who desired to hear that gods had to be forever listening for them in the most peculiar places…

As he closed his eyes and drifted into a deep sleep, he thought that his name suited him because he was finally cut off from guilt. Seaver wasn't the name of a monster, after all. Monsters were severed from redemption because they felt no guilt for their crimes, but he wasn't chopped off from redemption. He had felt remorse for his crimes, repented, and now he was finally at peace.

Now, he could sleep without torturing himself with everything he should have done differently. Now, he did not have to scream silently because the gods had heard his cries and at last had relieved him of his anguish. Even though he would sin again, he would never hate himself any more. His father had loved him enough to die for him and his friends had saved his life, so it was about time that he started loving himself.


End file.
